Employment announcement crashes BLS website

First the good news: The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that U.S. employment is up. Now the bad: Scores of users interested in the news crashed the BLS website shortly after the announcement.

The failure occurred soon after the 8:30 a.m. scheduled monthly release of figures. The bureau reported that the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent, the lowest level in more than two years.

The outage quickly was noticed by Twitter users.

“The November jobs report is so hot it has evidently killed the BLS website!” tweeted Michael Derby, a reporter for the Dow Jones newswire.

“Once again, BLS website goes down the morning the job numbers come out,” wrote Dave Jamieson, a workplace reporter for Huffington Post. The BLS website also failed in August when a similar surge of traffic occurred.

Today’s problem apparently persisted for more than 60 minutes. “BLS website still down? After more than an hour?” tweeted Felix Salmon, financial reporter for Reuters.

A BLS spokesman confirmed the site experienced issues to the Washington Post Federal Eye.

Operation of the BLS website apparently was restored in mid- to late morning.

About the Author

Alice Lipowicz is a staff writer covering government 2.0, homeland security and other IT policies for Federal Computer Week.

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